A nonprofit watchdog group on Monday broadened a lawsuit it filed last month against several top national security officials in the Trump administration, asking a federal judge to force them to preserve all messages they have sent as part of their official business on Signal, an encrypted communications app.
The amended suit was filed one day after The New York Times reported that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared detailed information about forthcoming strikes in Yemen on March 15 in a private Signal group chat that included his wife, brother and personal lawyer.
The watchdog group, American Oversight, filed an initial version of its suit in Federal District Court in Washington, shortly after Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic, revealed that he had been inadvertently added to a separate Signal group chat in which top Trump officials — including Mr. Hegseth, the C.I.A. director John Ratcliffe and Vice President JD Vance — discussed sensitive details about the strikes in Yemen against Houthi rebels.
The fact that Mr. Hegseth also shared information about the strikes in a second Signal chat indicates “that the use of Signal to conduct official government business by administration officials is widespread,” the amended lawsuit said.
The suit continued: “Senior administration officials used, and likely continue to use, a commercially available text message application with an auto-delete function and no apparent mechanism to fully preserve federal records on government record keeping systems.”
American Oversight’s new request to Judge James E. Boasberg, who is overseeing the case, would cover any Signal messages about official business sent by or received from Mr. Hegseth and Mr. Ratcliffe, along with Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence; Scott Bessent, the Treasury Secretary; and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Late last month, Judge Boasberg ordered all of the officials to preserve the messages on the initial Signal chat, known as the “Houthi PC Small Group Chat.”
